This movie is my favorite of the series. It really is a polarizing movie, because it takes the series in a particular direction that forces it in a direction many people didn't want it to go. I love it on its own merits, but I don't love a lot of what it led to. The sequels started to circle in on themselves and eventually they collapsed. How does the old poem go? "Things fall apart, the center cannot hold, mere anarchy is loosed upon the world." But all of that was way in the future when I watched Saw III for the first time, and I prefer to judge this movie as-is, without taking into account all the chaos that came afterward. So How does this movie rate? What do I think makes it better than all the other movies?
This movie picks up where part II left off, with the search for the missing cop from part II. The other detectives who are searching for him must do battle with the infamous Jigsaw and his maniacally elaborate traps in order to try and find him. Most of the movie follows one victim caught in a Jigsaw trap who must figure out why she is there and how she can escape with her life. As per usual, Jigsaw is targeting her family, and she must escape the trap to save not only her own life but theirs as well. We wise and wiley viewers know that nothing is ever easy with the Jigsaw killer, there must be some more elaborate plan behind things, and with this movie there's the added drama that the victim is a doctor who must work to save Jigsaw's life even while she works to save her own. Will she be able to figure out what's going on and save the day?
Jigsaw's traps in this movie are meaner than they were in the other movies, and that's saying something. Even on my first viewing, I could tell that the traps were meaner and harder, if not impossible, to solve, and that the Jigsaw killer must have been in a REALLY bad mood when he designed these traps. There's also a second victim in this movie who is trying to escape a Jigsaw puzzle while the doctor is also fighting to keep Jigsaw alive until the man finishes his grisly quest. I think part of what made me like this movie so much was that I figured out the twist; I knew who the man was and who the doctor was and how they were connected and what they had to do in order to survive Jigsaw's traps. That turned out to be a bad thing, as I spent most of my time yelling at the screen, telling the characters what to do and watching them do the exact opposite.
like i said before, sequels are always bigger and badder than the original, and these movies are no exception. The traps here are more elaborate, and the consequences for failing the tests are much harsher. There's even more gore than the second movie, though it didn't seem as mean spirited as that one did (probably because the characters are different). I really cared about the characters, the doctor and the man, though they were flawed as all humans are, and I was rooting for them, even though Jigsaw's victims don't tend to fare well in these movies. I can hope, right? I would say this is the last of the movies in the series where the gore was essential to the plot and not just there to be over-the-top and ridiculous. so why do I think this movie is better than the others? Well it has characters I cared about, a twist that was easy enough for me to figure out so I could just focus on watching the movie, it had some cool gore but not so much that it seemed excessive, one of the characters said something really profound in this movie; "Vengeance doesn't solve anything, it only makes the pain greater." I need to remind myself of that sometimes. But the main reason I liked thismovieso much is because it had an ending that made me really want to see what would happen in the fourth movie. Bring on the sequel! I'm ready!
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